At the current stage the all new GTD application “The Hit List” has no direct support for fetching certain emails from Mail.app and make tasks out of them. OmniFocus does it and there is a AppleScript for Things to accomplish this.

I searched the internet a little but didn’t found a script for Mail.app and THL. So I wrote a little mail-to-thl1 for myself:

using terms from application "Mail"
on perform mail action with messages theMessages for rule theRule
tell application "Mail"
set theMailCount to (count of theMessages)
repeat with counter from 1 to theMailCount
set msg to item counter of theMessages
set theAttachmentCount to (count of mail attachments of msg)
set _title to subject of msg
set _sender to sender of msg
set _messageURL to "message://%3c" & msg's message id & "%3e"
tell application "The Hit List"
tell inbox to set theTask to make new task with properties {title:_title & " from " & _sender & " @email", notes:_messageURL}
end tell
end repeat
end tell
end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from

I use a simple Mail.app rule to execute the AppleScript on the arrival of certain eMail. This script then creates a new task for every Mail in the THL inbox and atteches a link to the mail as note to the task.

Yesterday I noticed a new clean and lean GTD application called “The Hitlist” from Potion Factory. It’s got a simply and clean interface but still seems to have all the essential functionalities one would expect from a powerfull GTD application.

I did just a short test and some screenshots to get a vast overview and like to share it.

The Main screen features the Inbox and a sidebar with access to all important areas:

One can open several tabs in the main view although you can access the areas via the sidebar. But when you hide the sidebar you’ll still able to access the other lists via the tabs.

Very important for me is the feature to collect tasks in projects and nest projects into projects. This is one of the major features I miss in Things from Cultured Code.

The bottom bar can show either a filter (on tags) or dynamic hints.

Tags and context can be entered by prepending them with a special character (@ for contexts, / for tags). This is very usefull as you don’t have to switch to another input field to enter tags and contexts.

So all over it seems a very lean but still powerfull application. I’ll stay with OmniFocus for the moment but “The Hitlist” is definitly worth a closer look.

I used to send me eMails with Tasks when I’m on the run. OmniFocus is able to fetch these Mails automatically into it’s Inbox. But not so Things. I always missed this feature and looked around for a possible Solution.

Now I found one in the CulturedCode Wiki to Things. They provide an AppleScript to do exactly this. You just have to create a rule in Mail.app to filter the eMails you want to send to Things and execute the script. Things must be running to work.